Dark Cries
by Logray Vadisi
Summary: This is a story about a trip to Jusenkyo that went wrong, and the effects that it has on the life of a certain pigtailed martial artist. It is also now a crossover with 2 other series. if you can figure them out, good on ya!
1. Chapter 1

"AAAUUUGGGHHH!!!" From outside. "Breakfast is ready." From downstairs. These are the sounds that woke Akane from sleep. 'Are they at it again?' she thought as she slowly and angrily got dressed for school. 'Can't they at least be quieter about it? It▓s not like they have to make so much noise when practicing.' This thought brought her all the way downstairs, where Kasumi was setting out her usual wonderful breakfast.

"Oh, good morning, Akane." Kasumi said as Akane came in. She sat down at her spot as Ranma-chan walked in, followed by a very wet and annoyed panda.

"Why do I always end up in the pond?" Ranma-chan grumbled, as he walked into the kitchen and came back out a few seconds later as a male Ranma. He then proceeded to speed eat his way through his own food, while fighting off the fat panda's attempts to steal his food. A few minutes later, Akane grabbed their bentos as they ran out the door on their way to school. She ran down the road with Ranma taking his usual spot along the top of the fence. "Hey, you think Kuno's gonna be outta the hospital yet?"

Akane replied," I hope not. I don't feel like putting him into lower earth orbit today. That would make me late for class again, and I don't want to have to stand out in the hall with a stupid baka like you."

"Well, who would-" Ranma next words were cut off by a bicycle bell and a "Nihao, Airen!" as Shampoo came along the fence behind Ranma and stopped with her tire on Ranma's head.

"Ranma no go school. Ranma go on date with Shampoo?"

Ranma calmly flipped the bike off of his head, but not soon enough to avoid an Amazon Glomp from Shampoo.

"No, thanks, I gotta go to school." 'Man, I can't believe this. School actually has a use┘ Getting me away from an insane Amazon┘.'

"Okay, Airen, Shampoo bring you lunch then." With a final glomp, Shampoo, jumped on her bicycle and returned to her deliveries. After she left, Ranma noticed that Akane had simply walked on ahead without him.

"Hey, Akane, wait up." Ranma yelled as he ran to catch up.

"Oh, are you done playing kissy face with Shampoo?" Akane asked. As they approached the gates, they found Kuno was, indeed, out of the hospital, and waiting for them.

"Oh, my lovely Tendo Akane, and the fiery Pig-Tailed Girl, both here together! What have I done to be graced by the Kami themselves with such a beautiful sight?" It was only then that Ranma noticed he was a she again. It only took a moment and a combined hit from Ranma-chan and Akane to send Kuno flying into orbit. As they were nearly late for class again, Ranma-chan decided to just go to class as she was and wait till class break to change back to his male form. Within five minutes of them showing up in class, Ranma was asleep at her desk, and Akane was quietly taking notes, hoping the baka wouldn't snore again today...

Newspaper Clippings from the Nerima Gazette-  
Police are still baffled over the recent string of strange deaths that have been occurring in and around Tokyo for the last month. The bodies are all young females, each having been apparently eaten by a large creature. This reporter has seen a few of the photos of the bodies and is still wondering what kind of animal would be able to...

Lunchtime came as usual, but Ranma could still not shake the feeling that something was wrong. As usual, though, Ranma was too preoccupied to notice as there was presently a battle going on between Shampoo and Ukyo over who would get their food eaten first, Ukyo or Shampoo. While they were arguing, Akane sat down beside Ranma and handed him his bento.

"Here, I brought you your lunch. Made it for you last night." She smiled, not noticing the grimace on Ranma's face as he opened it, looking at the food within, and trying to figure out a way to get out of eating her usual dose of poison. But as she was looking on expectantly, he decided to put on a brave face and try it out. He immediately went pale as Akane asked, "Is it alright? I slaved over the stove for an hour..." 'I won't tell him that Kasumi made me do it, then watched me like a hawk... Still don't see why the stupid baka is worth all this trouble...' She noticed that he was still stiff and clenched her fist in preparation. As she was about to leave another Ranma-shaped hole in the ground, he spoke up, "Akane, is this your curry?"

"If you don't like it, baka, then say so!" She turned away, preparing to pound him into a thin paste, only to hear something she never thought she would hear.

"Akane, it's actually not half bad. Maybe a little too spicy, but at least I can eat it..." 'She seems to be getting better. Maybe she▒ll get this cooking down before...'

"R-Really, Ranma? You're not just saying that to get out of a beating, are you?" She said as she hefted her still clenched fist and glared at him. At this point he continued to eat, oblivious to Ukyo and Shampoo staring at him, both with the same thought. 'Ranma's eating AKANE'S cooking? And enjoying it? Must be something wrong with him...' Ranma got up and walked back into the building.

"Come on, Akane, we're gonna be late for afternoon classes." Akane had to scramble to make it back in time for class, only to find out that her and Ranma both ended up with bucket duty in the hall for nearly running over Ms. Hinako. The day dragged on as usual, with Ranma falling asleep in class again, and Akane again taking notes and cursing Ranma for making them stand in the hallway. Finally the last bell rang, and Ranma walked out the door and started to head home with Akane.

'Maybe this is a good time to ask her what I've wanted to ask her all week,' Ranma thought as the walked. "Um... Akane... I got something to ask you. Um..." 'Damn, I'm no good at this so here goes.'

"Hey, Akane, wanna go get something to eat? I'll buy..."

'Is stupid asking me out on a date?' Akane thought. "Really, Ranma? You want to go out on a date with me?"

"No, I want to go out with some other uncute tomboy. Besides, it's just for some food. Not like it's that bigga deal..."

Akane held back her anger with a monumental effort by remembering that the baka had just asked her out, and she had something that she wanted to say to him anyway. "Ok," she said. "Where do you want to go?" Ranma was flustered for a moment then got the bright idea of saying, "I got it! Let▓s go grab some burgers and eat them in the park. It's been a while since we did that."

They walked together to the park after picking up their burgers, Ranma carrying the food and Akane with the drinks. They stopped at a familiar tree and sat down.

"Remember the last time we were here?" Akane asked.

"Yeah, you were talking about Dr. Tofu..." he said as he grabbed a burger and started eating. Akane did the same, and took a drink from her soda.

"Remember what he used to do with Betty? Think he still does that?"

"Nah, he ain▓t around, remember? He left the area... "

A paper wrapper bounced off of Ranma's head and Akane said, "I knew that, baka, I was just wondering. I mean he's been gone for so long... I wonder if he misses Kasumi..." At this point, they both reached into the bag to grab a burger, but instead ended up grabbing each other's hands. They both froze.

"Hey!" they both said at the same time. Ranma pulled his hand away first, leaving Akane's hand in the bag and a flush on both of their cheeks, but for different reasons.

"Sorry, you go ahead, Akane."

'Is the moron actually blushing?' Akane thought.

A few moments later, the flush disappears as a voice shouts out, "Ranma, I'll kill you for taking Shampoo from me!" Ranma pushed Akane out of the way as a large amount of chains tore through the bag of burgers and the space where both Akane and Ranma had been sitting moments ago.

"Ranma since you took away the one that I love, I'm gonna take away the one you love,■ he said as he managed to send several chains around Akane and starting to run off with her.

"Leave her alone, Mousse, I'm the one you want," he said as Mousse sent Akane into a tree and into unconsciousness. Ranma was starting to run towards Akane to free her from the chains, when Mousse pulled a dozen water balloons from his sleeves and started juggling them.

"Do you know what these are, Ranma? These contain some of the last unmixed water from Jusenkyo," he said as he started lobbing the water balloons at them. Without thinking, Ranma jumped in the way of the balloons, trying to destroy them without getting any on Akane. He destroyed the first volley of balloons with a few small ki blasts and went on the attack, knocking Mousse into low earth orbit with an uppercut. As he turned back to Akane to help her out of the chains, a single water balloon fell from far above, missing its intended target, but hitting Ranma instead.  
Ranma was wracked with pain from the two curses fighting within his body for dominance. He let out a scream of pain that was enough to wake Akane from unconsciousness. She looked up to find Ranma in the throes of agony as his body contorted unnaturally in pain for a few seconds, then took on his female form, with a few differences. The most notable differences being some kind of leathery mass flowing from between her shoulder blades and the change in her hair color, which was now a deep brown with a thick red stripe down the center and seemed longer. She also had quite a few scratches along her arms and legs. As she continued squirming, Akane noticed that Ranma-chan was still unconscious. 'Great! Now I have to carry the stupid baka,' she thought with a sneer as she picked Ranma-chan up in her arms, noticing that she seemed somehow lighter... 

News clip run on the radio-  
⌠Police are still concerned over the recent rash of senseless deaths that have brought fear to the Tokyo area for the last several weeks and have now instituted a 9pm curfew for the safety of all┘ 


	2. Chapter 2

As Ranma-chan was struck with the water, everything went black. After a few moments, she noticed that there was light nearby. She walked towards the light, then noticed that she was male again.

"Damn. That's the third time today. When will this end?" As he approached the light, he noticed a small still pond, mostly surrounded with trees and bathed in light, and knelt down to look into it at his reflection. What he saw gave him a small shock. Instead of his male reflection, his female reflection stared back at him, with a sad smile on its face. A voice seemed to echo through his mind, that of his female half. ⌠Look out, Ranma┘⌠ His senses suddenly warned him of an attack, and he jumped into the air. A brown blur flew under him and disappeared into the darkness. He landed and turned in that directions, only to have his senses kick in again. He dodged to the left and the same blur flew by again, drawing a few lines of blood along his right arm. The attacks continued for a few minutes, each one drawing another series of lines of blood along his arms and legs. After a few moments, he noticed that the attacks seemed to have stopped. He waited for a moment, only to have her senses kick into overdrive as a heavy mass struck him on the back of his head, knocking him out.

When he awoke, he found that he was lying on Akane's bed, and was female again. Akane was there, looking somewhat confused.

"Ranma, are you okay?" she said. That was when Ranma-chan noticed the pain from her back. She tried to roll over, but only seemed to increase the pain when she put her hand on a sheet of leather as she tried to sit up. "What's this, Akane? Didn't know you were into leather"  
Akane only shook her head and said, "That's not mine. It's something on your back"  
"What? I ain▓t got nothing on my back, you macho tomboy┘"

Akane only sighed and stood up, pulling Ranma off her bed into a standing position. "Look behind you, pervert. Do you see any leather on my bed?" Ranma-chan turned and looked, and, sure enough, there was no leather on the bed. "Hm? Where did it go?" At that moment she heard something sounding like leather on leather behind her. She turned to look, and noticed the odd leathery protrusions on her back.

"Hm? What is that? Why am I still wearing my backpack?" That was when she noticed that her ponytail was much longer and dark brown instead of bright red.

"Akane, what is going on? Why do I feel so weird?"

"I don't know. This is how I found you when I woke up. I carried you home, and you have been sleeping on MY bed since then. And what happened to your ears?"

"What are you talking about?!? They are perfectly normal!" At this Akane wordlessly held up a small mirror to Ranma, and she noticed that they were indeed quite pointed. As she was opening her mouth to say something to Akane, she saw that there was something wrong with her teeth. They seemed sharper and a bit longer. As she ran her tongue along the now entirely unfamiliar confines of her mouth, she heard someone knocking at the door, only to notice that Akane didn't move.  
"You gonna answer that? Someone just knocked at your door." Akane went to the door and opened it to find no one standing there.

"What are you talking about, Baka? Wouldn't I have heard someone knocking at the door"  
At that moment, someone knocked again, Ranma-chan clearly heard Kasumi open the now open door and say, "Why, hello, Ukyo. How are you today?"

She also heard Ukyo's response, "I▒m fine, Kasumi. Is Ran-chan here?" Before she could hear anything more, Akane said, "Hey baka, are you listening to me? I said there's nobody there"  
"But I just heard Kasumi and Ukyo talking..."

Akane started to fume. "You know, if you are going to just ignore me and make things up, then you can just GET OUT OF MY ROOM, YOU STUPID PERVERTED FREAK!!!" As usual, she wound up with a good punch to pound Ranma-chan through the window and into the pond out back. Ranma-chan could do nothing but stare at the bright red flash of anger as Akane belted him through the window. Since this was not what Akane was quite expecting, her punch hit Ranma-chan with quite a bit more force behind it than usual. The force of the hit still sent Ranma-chan through the window as aimed. As she went by, she hit her head on the edge of the roof. She still had enough force left to achieve low-earth orbit.

The force of the blow was not quite enough to knock Ranma-chan out, but was enough to leave her woozie for the few seconds it took her to leave Nerima on an arc that took her close to her mothers home in Juuban. As she was reaching the end of her flight on Akane Air, she noticed that she was going to land in a shallow fountain that had a few people sitting around it. Ranma-chan thought she recognized one of those people but had more immediate concerns, like not crashing head-first into the bottom of the fountain. She stretched out her arms with the intent of slowing her flight, and felt an odd sensation, not unlike stretching a long-unused muscle, and her flight immediately stopped... ten feet above the fountain, and just above the person she now recognized as her mother. After a moment, Ranma-chan realized she was still above her mother, and not falling. She looked around her to figure out why, and noticed something moving behind her out of the corner of her eye, accompanied by an odd pulling of her back muscles. She tried to look behind herself, only to notice that the odd leathery protrusions on her back were... flapping? A moments odd puzzlement was enough for her to stop flapping and drop the last ten feet into the fountain, right behind her mother. She stood up in the fountain to find herself face-to-katana with her own mother.

"Who are you, demon? And what do you want with me?"

"It's me, mom. It's Ranma."

"Nice try, demon. You don't look anything like my son, in either of his forms. Now try again, before I remove your head!"

"Mom, it's really-"

While normally, any attack would trigger an automatic response by Ranma-chan's body, this was her mother. Which is why Ranma-chan's body didn't immediately respond to the threat of her mother's katana as it neared her. Those same reflexes did trigger, but triggered too late to actually save her from any harm. They were enough to save Ranma-chan's life as her arm shot up to take the blow meant for her neck, lodging the katana deep in one of the bones of her forearm.

The intense burst of pain was enough to bring Ranma-chan back to her senses enough to yank her arm away from the reach of her mother, pulling the still lodged sword away with it. With a sad look at her mother, Ranma-chan took off at full speed, trailing blood and being followed by a crazy katana-lady... and watched by a small set of deep purple eyes. After a moment, the owner of those eyes, a short dark haired schoolgirl, turned to slowly follow the trail of blood, wondering if she would need to call her friends for this one...

After a few minutes of following the trail, the girl came across the lady walking back down the road toward the fountain with a satisfied look on her face, and with her katana in it▓s sheath. As the lady was walking she was slowly, almost mechanically, wrapping it back up in it▓s silk wrap. The young girl▓s eyes went wide with speculation. ▒What did this mean? Did she┘ ?▓ Her speculation was cut off by a quiet thump heard from a nearby alley. It was just loud enough to attract her attention, but not enough to attract the attention of the lady who was now past her and almost back at the fountain again. The young girl turned towards the sound and saw what looked to be a human hand covered in blood protruding from beside a nearby dumpster, just past the mouth of said alley. She also noticed the slowly expanding pool of blood spreading out beneath the hand┘

Foliage. Green foliage. Somehow the green was appropriate, but it did not fit in with the crimson drops that spattered the area. It also did not fit in with the pale color of bloodless flesh from the 3 campers that had met their end here. But what stuck out the most was the 8-foot-tall grey humanoid shape that seemed to dance amongst the corpses┘ 


	3. Chapter 3

Ranma opened his eyes to find himself again in darkness, kneeling near a small familiar pond. He quickly looked down at himself and saw that he was male and unharmed. As he began to look around, he heard the sound of someone crying in pain, and suddenly noticed he wasn't alone. Kneeling across the pond from him was a short brown-haired girl that seemed somehow familiar. It was when he looked into the tear-filled eyes of this girl that he realized who it was. He was looking at his girl-half. But she was different now. Where before she had red hair the same length as his, now she had brown hair that reached to the middle of her back, and had a red stripe down the middle. The eyes that stared back sadly at him were not the same blue as his, but were now a deep brown, almost black. But the biggest change she had was the large pair of bat-like wings that were currently stretched out behind her…

After taking all this in for a moment, he noticed that she was heavily injured, so much so that the water in the pond was turning red from her blood and she was barely holding herself up. He jumped to her side and took her in his arms, trying to hold her up. She smiled at him and whispered' "Ranma, thank you for caring. I am glad to have finally met you…"

"Quiet," Ranma said as he gently lay her down and started treating her various deep wounds. He noticed that they looked like weapon strikes, then remembered what happened before he got here. "Are these the wounds my mother inflicted on me?"

"Yes, Ranma, they are… I took them to save your life, since you... saved me from that pool… When you fell in, somehow you took more than just my cursed image... you took me as well… I have enjoyed being free from that pool where I was locked so long ago… Thank you…" At this, she took his hand in hers. Then her eyes closed, and her breathing became labored. Ranma began to panic, before he noticed that, while her breathing was labored, it was still steady. As he watched her breathing, he noticed a few other differences from what he remembered of his girl-form. First, she had teeth that seemed sharper, and a little longer, from what he remembered as his own. He also noticed that her nails were digging slightly into his hand, that they were very sharp, and quite a bit longer than his. Where his nails were trimmed by years of martial arts, hers extended nearly an inch from her fingers and tapered to sharp points.

After a few moments of looking at her, he noticed that she was shivering, and that her wings were splayed out behind her. 'Maybe if I wrap her wings around her, that will help her stay warm?' Thought led to action as he reached for her wings to pull them around her, only to notice that she had not let go of his hand, and was in fact holding it tighter. "Calm down, I'm not gonna leave ya." This seemed to do the trick as she seemed to smile and the grip on his hand loosened. He noticed that she was still cold, as she was still shivering badly, and seemed to be getting worse. He also noticed that it seemed to be getting much colder, as he was starting to get cold, as well...

This was when he noticed that her eyes were open, and she was looking at him with a sad smile. "Ranma... I'm sorry, but I don't think I'm going to make it... Thank you for caring... I leave you one last gift, if you will take it. I leave you... control... Use it to fight the coming dark..." With these words, the girl burst into a cloud of golden light that slowly enclosed Ranma. Her soft voice filled his head with song for a moment, then left Ranma with these words. "You will soon meet those who you can trust, but beware Hades, for her way is ruin..."

The young schoolgirl worked for a few minutes freeing Ranma from what seemed to be a mountain of garbage that she seemed to have crawled under to avoid the sword. As she was digging, she began to wonder.. 'Why am I doing this in the first place?' Then it struck her. The bat-girl had done nothing wrong except maybe to splash some water on the katana-lady. She had not tried to attack her, or drain her life force, or anything. So why would the lady attack like that? These thoughts were the ones ringing through her head as she shifted a large piece of cardboard and uncovered her goal, the bat-girl's body. The young schoolgirl looked over the young bat-girl and noticed that her wounds were pretty bad, almost deadly. This thought led to her glancing around. After making sure no one was watching, she knelt over the injured girl and a warm glow began to emanate from her hands. The wounds on the injured girl began to heal, but the schoolgirl was getting tired. In fact, the closer she got to done, the more tired she got. It was at this point that she noticed that her healing power would not stop, and in fact was going stronger than she had ever used it before, draining her much further than she had ever felt in this lifetime. Finally, just as the last of Ranma-chan's wounds closed, the schoolgirl passed out and pitched forward onto the bat-girl just as she opened her eyes...

Ranma-Chan opened her eyes to see a young, dark-haired schoolgirl falling forward towards her. Her martial artist reflexes were enough to grab the girl in her arms to stop the girl from hitting the ground and instead onto her. Another instinct became action as her wings unfolded, seemingly of their own accord, and wrapped both Ranma and the young girl in a cocoon of fleshy wings. In his healed but still weak state, the warmth provided by the cocoon was enough to lull Ranma back to sleep. Had he been able to stay awake any longer, he would have noticed 2 things. The first would have been the gentle purple glow that suffused the inside of the cocoon. And the second would have been the sound of girls yelling and explosions. That sound was followed by that of shifting trash from outside the cocoon as it was buried under a large amount debris caused by a fight between the sailor senshi and a Youma. It would unfortunately be several days before this debris would be cleaned up enough to discover the cocoon...

Signal heard over broadband radio- "Train wreck reported in Kabotoke Tunnel. A beast is expected to be responsible. Task force move out immediately. I repeat, train wreck in Kabotoke Tunnel. Task force, move out..."


	4. Chapter 4

an. thank you to my reader who alerted me to the languishing status of this story. you know who you are. so, just for you, here it is, chapter 4 of dark cries.

-A week after the cocoon was formed

Hikari Tanaka was glad. Through some quirk of fate, she had remained undiscovered while she dug through this large pile of rubble behind the local supermarket. She figured that if she got lucky enough she might just be able to find some canned goods that had been overlooked. As she dug, she thought about the last few days, since she had sprouted the nice horns on the top of her head They were shaped kind of like those of a ram and curled around the sides of her head. It had started a few days after she had taken those shots, the so-called flu shots that left her sick to her stomach for the rest of the day, and only able to eat small quantities of meat before getting sick. She had had to go home from school that day because she felt so nauseous, and had gone immediately to bed.

When she had woken up the next morning, she quickly found that when she went to brush her hair, she had 2 rather large obstructions to her hairbrush. Moving her hair aside, she discovered the newly grown horns under it. The scream was loud enough to wake her parents in the next room, who rushed in to pound the pervert, only to find their daughter alone and crying in the corner. It only took one look for her father to immediately send her mother out of the room with the command, "Get the case." A few steps brought him to her side and his arms around her. His next words, while a bit short, would stick with her for a long time.

"It's okay, Hikari. We both still love you." With that she wrapped her arms around him and cried for what seemed an hour. Just as she was crying herself dry, she felt a needle slide into her neck, and then there was nothing.

When Hikari awoke, she found herself sitting in the shadow of a dumpster in an alley, full clothed in loose sweat suit with a large hood to hide her horns in, and with a camping backpack she recognized as her own, looking fully packed, and with a small note on top of it. The note was short, only saying 'Remember, we love you. Don't come home. We will come find you when it is safe.' That had been almost a week ago, and it took that long to go through the supply of food her parents had left her. When she had gone back to her home earlier that day, against her parent's wishes, some strange men with really big guns were dragging a few body bags out of her house. Luckily they had not seen her, since she recognized one of them as having been there when she had gotten her shot, the one that made her sick.

So Hikari ran until she couldn't run anymore. When she finally came to her senses, she found herself in a small alley behind the remains of a supermarket that been recently demolished. Oddly enough, when she looked around at the rubble, she saw that when the building was demolished, it still had some goods inside. Seeing noone was around, she had decided to start digging through the rubble, to try to find something she could save to eat later. Within a few minutes of starting digging, she noticed she was easily able to move chunks of rubble that would have given her no end of trouble a week ago. After finally sifting through most of a particularly large she came across a small cavity that held a pair of sleeping girls, both clinging tightly to each other, and wrapped in what seemed to be a dark brown leather sheet. Thinking them dead, she started to recover them with the piece of rubble she had found them under.

That stopped real quick when an arm shot out from the pair and lightly grasped her wrist. Looking down she saw herself staring into two pairs of eyes, one brown and one purple

-Meanwhile at the gates of time

Pluto had been basically channel surfing, as it were, watching various divergent time streams on the gates to pass a little time. When she was about to flip back to her own home time line, a massive shift occurred in it, as well as all divergent ones. What she saw was enough for her to scream in panic. She spent several weeks, subjective time, at the time gates trying to figure out what went wrong. When she discovered the cause, she spent a few hours crying at the loss.

After she recovered, she knew she had to call a senshi meeting, something she rarely did. She knew that the other senshi would be there since the only thing that could cause her to call a meeting like that would be major changes of plans. A downward slash of her key brought a portal to the time and place she needed, the Hikawa shrine, right before her called meeting. If she had stayed at the gates a moment longer, she would have seen a small glowing cocoon opening in a small alley, and the events that followed.

Stepping through the portal brought Pluto into a room filled with the other senshi, all awaiting her arrival. Before she could even say a word, Usagi started the questioning by asking, "Why have you called us here?"

Pluto knelt before her princess, knowing the news she brought would make Usagi mad. "Highness, we have 2 very big problems. The first, and relatively smaller one, is that Crystal Tokyo has disappeared from over 95 percent of the time lines. I am sure you don't want to go the route required by the remaining ones. At the minunum, it would require the deaths of four senshi as well as almost the entire population of the earth."

All the senshi started trying to cut in, but Usagi simply overshouted them."QUIET!!!" When everyone fell silent at her uncharacteristic command, she continued her questioning of Pluto. "What caused this event to occur, Pluto?"

Pluto thought for a moment on the best way to say what she had to, then decided to just say it. "Crystal Tokyo was lost to us because the Silence has slipped her leash."

Usagi paled, then brightened. "You mean Hotaru is finally all grown up?"

Pluto only shook her head. "If only it were that easy. No, I mean that Hotaru is no longer a senshi, and in fact has full command of her powers without the Silver Millenium constraints. There were certain protocols in place should a senshi ever slip out of control like this, and they were stored in... Hmmm... Ami, do you have you computer with you?"

The blue-haired senhsi nodded before pulling it out and wordlessly handing it to Pluto. Pluto took the computer with a smile, turned it over, and proceeded to remove the back cover, showing a small metal plate with two round indentations in it. "Usagi, I need you to put your wand in this one, while I put my key in the other. This will unlock access to the protocols we will need to find Hotaru, hopefully before it's too late." With that she tapped the computer.

A quick light show later, Eternal Sailor moon stood with her wand at the ready. Pluto set the computer down on a nearby table where they could both reach, and together they pressed wand and key into the indentations. A bright flash appeared, and when the light faded, the computer was again whole, with no signs of tampering. A few moments later, a deep baritone voice echoed through the room. "Daedalus Protocols active. Command?"

Pluto answered the voice with a simple command. "Designate Saturn as rogue, and locate."

A gentle humming came from the computer for about 3 minutes. Then the same baritone ansered. "Saturn located." A moment later, a holographic representation of Tokyo in perfect moving detail appeared floating over the computer. A red glowing sphere with Saturn's symbol appeared beside what looked to be a large mass of rubble. The reactions to this were varied. Pluto merely looked at the representation and memorized the location of the symbol. Ami was stunned that her computer could do something like this, and with this much detail. Eternal Sailor Moon was busy watching the cars run along the holographic streets.


End file.
